The Observations, Findings, and Technical Stylings Of An IT Professional

How To Fix Or Reset The WMI

Recently had an issue where the WMI was not working properly. Had a PC that was not applying any Group Policy, and got an error indicating that WMI was having issues after running a gpupdate /force. I checked the event logs and found the same message again about WMI.

The solution was to repair the WMI repository. The winmgmt command is what I used, you can use winmgmt /? to see the available switches and built-in help. Make sure to open the command prompt as an administrator or you will get access denied messages.

winmgmt /backup
While not necessary, you probably want to start troubleshooting WMI by making a backup. You can restore it later with the /restore switch.

winmgmt /verifyrepository
This is the first command you should use to check the status of WMI directly. If it’s broken, you’ll get a message saying that here.

winmgmt /salvagerepository
This will be your first attempt to actually repair WMI. If this doesn’t work then you can move on to the next option.

winmgmt /resetrepository
Completely resets your WMI repository to the state after a clean OS install. This should fix it but keep an eye out for other problems this may cause.